The nurse was never in a hurry, and sometimes she would sit down at the picnic table beside the little flower bed and talk to Nancy. Mel kept weekly records about the nurse in a black notebook—“Arrival and Departure Times,” “Contents of Car,” “No. of Gallons and Purchase Price of Gas”—he learned from observation. But the list he kept in the back of the notebook, “Miscl. Facts of Interest,” he got from eavesdropping. Her birthday was in June, her sister raised prizewinning goldfish, she had once owned a dog named Happy who had a skin problem.

One Saturday in January the nurse asked Nancy, “How do you root a rose? This old lady I’m nursing has a red rose in her backyard, in full bloom since Christmas.”

“You have to wait till spring,” said Nancy.

“This old lady won’t last that long,” said the nurse.

“Red rose, blooms all year,” Mel wrote in his notebook.

On a February Saturday when Nancy was putting in some cool-weather plants for spring, the nurse sat down by a flat of lamb’s ears on the picnic table. “I never saw a gray plant,” she said, feeling the soft, floppy leaves.

“Stachys,” said Nancy. “It can’t take the heat though.”

“I used to have a boyfriend whose earlobes felt just like this. I think his name was Bob.”

“Bob,” Mel wrote in his black notebook, and he thought about it a long time—Bob.

Another Saturday, when the vacuum shut off, the nurse didn’t hang up the hose right away, but stood there listening to Country Like It Used to Be on the radio, Keith Whitley singing “I’m Lonesome Without You.”

“This is my favorite song,” the nurse said to Nancy. “Listen to this banjo part right here.” Nancy stopped digging and they stood there, Nancy leaning on her shovel and the nurse dangling the pleated hose. They listened to the end of the song: “But if you should ever change your mind, dear, remember me, I’ll be around.”

“That’s sad,” said Nancy. “That old boy’s just fooling himself, ’cause you know she ain’t coming back.”

Then the song was over, the nurse started coiling up the hose, and an advertisement came on the radio for an herbal breast-enlargement treatment. Breast was another of those terrible words like loiter that seemed to mean way too much. Mel felt his face burning.

“If you are like many women, you may not be happy with the way your breasts look and feel,” said the announcer in a loud, penetrating voice. Suddenly Mel couldn’t stand it. He stood up and stammered, “You—you—you don’t know that for sure! She might not be gone forever! She might come back!” The nurse stared at him, beginning to smile, and Nancy grabbed him and hugged him tight. She smelled like pine straw. “You’re cute,” she said. “You just keep on thinking that way, sweetie.”